There has long been a Great Pundit Uncomfortableness with the public use of swear words. It has been seen as the domain of uncouth bloggers for some time now; during the run-up to the Iraq war it was clear that the Bush administration was manipulating evidence in an attempt to justify their desired military conflict—but the opposition, on the streets and on the internet, were pooh-poohed for not being gentlemanly in their objections to such a thing. The signs! The shouts! How very unfortunate.
Similarly, when it was revealed that the United States was torturing prisoners of war in an effort to extract information administration officials wanted extracted—a war crime—it was treated as a scandalous thing, but you still weren't allowed to say that torturing prisoners of war was a fucking monstrous thing to do. To be honest, you weren't even taken seriously if you merely called it a monstrous thing to do; the prevailing pundit belief has long been that whatever nearly criminal or shudderingly unethical or crime against the Geneva Conventions a powerful might propose or actually do, those things were now proper discourse, by virtue of a serious person saying them or doing them, and objecting to such things with genuine, unfiltered anger was an entirely unserious thing to do.
You're never supposed to be quite that visibly invested in the moral, ethical, and legal underpinnings of our society, you see. You're supposed to comment on them from above, as if they were merely the landscape under the hot-air balloon in which you're currently sipping tea and unpacking your picnic lunch. We're all supposed to be friends here, on the op-ed pages, and if you're going to get all puffy and red-faced about cutting off medical aid to poor children or subjecting war prisoners to a few war crimes here or there then nobody is going to invite you to the next White House Correspondents Dinner now, are they?
This has long been one of my more obscure furies with the pundit class, not because I am uncontrollably enamored with th' swear words but because it never failed to give the game away; punditry is not serious. Punditry is a farce. Our allowable public discourse is stage-managed to the last spotlight and shoe-scuff. None of the people bleating in the papers about this or that injustice truly give a damn about any of them—you cannot "both sides" the impropriety of war crimes against the impropriety of saying shit on a public sidewalk, not without obliquely admitting that you haven't ever cared enough about either to have sat down with a moral yardstick and compared them. But that was, indeed, the pundit message. We may have been lied into war—but saying so was, if anything, equally uncouth. We may have tortured—but being truly angry about that only proves you to be immature.
So it's a bit odd to see the return of the should Democrats use swear words genre in our public discourse of late, after a long two decades of insistence that such things only proved you to be temperamentally unfit for the public sphere. The good news is that people are beginning to give less of a damn. The bad news is that this, too, may just be the result of things being so truly enfuckened these days that mere foul language can't compete.
Politicians have never been saints when it comes to salty language. Roll through the archives and you’ll find John F. Kennedy chewing out an Air Force General over a Washington Post story and Lyndon Johnson giving his tailor graphic instructions on how to ensure the breathability of his pants. Both Presidents Bush have had hot mic incidents on the campaign trail, and in 2004 it leaked to the press that Dick Cheney had told Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy to “fuck yourself” on the floor of the Senate.
But these exchanges were supposed to be private, or at least weren’t meant for immediate press write-ups. The incorporation of risqué language into the meticulously planned public statements and personas of upwardly mobile politicians appears to be new. And in a time marked by Trumpian combativeness and a decades-long coarsening of language, it might be a political asset.
Sure, whatever. At this point it's difficult to care. You do you, Washington. I'm sure we'll sort this all out eventually.
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At Daily Kos on this date in 2009—Feith-Based Intelligence:
Back in 2002, George W. Bush had a problem. He couldn't get the intelligence he wanted to justify going to war in Iraq. Oh, he could get lots of information, and some of it even suggested that Iraq was a danger. Only the information generated by intelligence agencies came with lots of caveats, possibilities, and alternatives. That wouldn't do.
Luckily, Cheney had the right man handy in Douglas Feith. Feith was the hardest of hardcore neocons, a protégé of Casper Weinberger who hated diplomacy, hated negotiation, hated every plan that didn't involve a series of loud explosions. Doug Feith was the one guy who could be counted on to never produce anything but black and white answers. In Feith's world, solutions were only generated in the crosshairs of a bomb sight. Negotiation and grey areas were for wimps.
On
today’s Kagro in the Morning show,
Greg Dworkin leads an explainer of the Byrd Rule trap that forced Republicans to exempt Congress from ACA repeal. Then, a recap of the day’s crazy on Korea, NAFTA, gov’t funding & Ivanka. And a failed attempt to reach out & understand one Trump voter.
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